Anna Biller put plenty of blood into “The Face of Horror.” She just isn’t sure it was enough blood for some of the folks at her movie’s world premiere.
“I’m not sure it was 100 percent the right crowd,” the filmmaker told IndieWire, the day after her extraordinary and heartbreaking ghost story debuted at TIFF Midnight Madness. “I think they wanted something more gory.”
Biller stressed that the screening nevertheless went well and the audience seemed engaged in the room. Still, she suspects some “dude bros” wanted fewer monologues and more maiming.
“I think they actually know the game that I’m playing,” she said. “They resent, in a way, having to sit through a women’s picture — a serious arthouse film, that may not be what they [usually] watch. I’m giving them all the surface of something lighter, and they’re having to sit through something heavier.”
It’s an irony as exquisite as one of Biller’s cinematic paintings.
Over the years, the writer/director has been widely praised for her stunning visuals, but also routinely criticized for asking viewers to invest too deeply in the emotion beneath some of genre storytelling’s most iconic surfaces. Early Letterboxd reviews that reduce “The Face of Horror” to a comedy, or object to the epic’s roughly two-hour running time, land like a stab in the heart for Biller.
“The lack of empathy is staggering,” she said. “I see women suffering, and I experience it. I see the unfairness that women are subjected to in the world just every single day that’s not talked about. It’s a real problem in women’s lives.”
Following 2007’s “Viva” and 2016’s “The Love Witch,” Biller’s third feature relocates the famous Japanese ghost story “Yotsuya Kaidan” to 14th-century England, where Kristine Froseth plays Eleanor: a pure-hearted woman whose clandestine marriage to a handsome knight (Jonah Hauer-King) becomes a waking nightmare. The betrayal itself is ancient, but its central discovery — that a supposedly “good man” can be terribly cruel — feels as urgent as ever.
“In this film, there’s medieval misogyny, which doesn’t feel that different to modern misogyny at times,” Biller said. She further described the strength of that parallel as “almost taboo” in light of the alarming challenges that increasingly face women and girls today.
“We can talk about it in a medieval folk tale ghost story, and we can still feel it,” she said.
Biller traces that dismissal to an insecurity specific to male-dominated genre audiences, arguing that films centered on women can be welcomed as visual novelties in programming spaces where they are nevertheless resisted as psychologically serious art. “That’s where words like ‘camp’ stop functioning as description and start hardening into dismissal.
“I do like the word ‘humor’ because there is intentional humor, of course,” she said, noting that catharsis is key to many great rape-revenge films. “But ‘camp,’ I feel like it’s failed seriousness.”
“The Face of Horror” is better described as a tragedy, in which two women battle unbearable hardship. Alongside the tortured Eleanor is her devoted sister, Beatrice (Ellie Bamber), whom Biller calls the “final girl” of the film. Familiar horror tropes and flashes of comedy, she said, don’t diminish her work’s gender politics. But calling an effort as methodical and intentional as this one “camp” can give moviegoers permission to dismiss the sincerity of its pain.
“There’s a defensiveness,” she said. “Like, ‘Please don’t take this seriously because if we do, then it indicts us as men.’ And I think especially horror fans, their entertainment is very safe for them because they don’t ever have to see men called out for anything.”
That reflex — to treat women as decorative even when their anguish drives the story — has shadowed much of the critical conversation around Biller’s work. It has also affected her ability to convert considerable influence into tangible power offscreen. After “The Love Witch,” Biller said, “Everybody was such a fan and said they thought I was such a genius and that they wanted to work with me on something else. And then it just never happened with anyone.”
The gap between acclaim and opportunity opened widest around Biller’s unmade “Bluebeard’s Castle,” an ambitious Gothic romance that struggled to secure financing. Biller told IndieWire enthusiasm cooled after producers read the screenplay and the project became difficult to place.
“It was a really good script, and a lot of people knew it was a really good script, but it’s because my work falls into this category that doesn’t fit,” Biller said. “In terms of programming, it fell between categories. ‘Is this a main competition film? Is it a platform film? Is it a Midnight Madness film?’ Well, it’s always going to fall into something like Midnight Madness because they’re afraid to take it seriously because of the color. But I’m asking you, if another major filmmaker used this kind of color, would it be considered non-serious?”
Biller eventually transformed “Bluebeard’s Castle” into her debut novel, but pushed ahead with “The Face of Horror” as a sort of professional line in the sand. “I was about to give up,” she said. “I thought if I couldn’t get this made, I would just stop.”
Instead, she expanded with her most ambitious tale yet. An exhilarating demonstration of what can happen when Biller’s exacting authorship is fully supported by the costly infrastructure of a professional production, “The Face of Horror” stands as a testament to her clarity of vision.
On “The Love Witch,” Biller spent more than two years drafting patterns and sewing costumes herself because she couldn’t afford a costume team. Doing everything wasn’t proof she was picky, Biller said. It was how she chose to protect the film’s integrity with the money she had.
“I feel like there’s this misconception out there that I am a control freak that needs to do everything,” Biller said. “It’s not that. It’s just that I’m incredibly meticulous about what I want it to look like and I’m not going to accept some bad horrible costumes just because I can’t afford good ones. And if you can make them yourself, then all it costs is the fabric.”
With “The Face of Horror,” Biller had a full costume room — with cutters, drapers, and stitchers who could translate her sketches into reality. The result is an even more luscious fantasyland than “The Love Witch” that is equally authentic to the woman who made it.
“It was the first time I think I’ve been on a movie that’s being done like how movies are normally done, and it was quite fabulous,” Biller said. “I really enjoyed that.” Having previously worked in virtually every department, she also arrived unusually fluent in what her collaborators required.
“What happens when you’ve worked in every department yourself is that you know exactly what everyone’s job is,” Biller said. “I understand how hard it is, what they’re doing and what they need, exactly what they need from me.” That fluency left room not only for crew members to contribute their skills impeccably, but also for the cast to fully inhabit their roles.
“The actors need to create their own characters,” she said. “I’m not creating those characters for them. I’m not dictating how anybody should perform. I’m not even dictating style.”
Froseth made Eleanor her own, Biller said, by drawing on emotions and experiences the director would never presume to define for her. During one of the character’s bloodiest moments, Froseth became so overwhelmed that she stepped away from the set in tears. Within 10 minutes, she was back and ready for another take. Of course, Biller had been crying, too.
“We were both sobbing because it was such a moment,” she said. That on-set experience gets to the heart of why “camp” feels so inadequate when writing about Biller. The filmmaker and her star were not standing outside the tragedy, archly commenting on its excesses. Instead, they were standing inside it — wholly embracing the agony their art suggests.
The same seriousness informs Biller’s lighting. By visually separating her characters from their richly rendered environments, she wants audiences to perceive the human being before the production design surrounding them.
“It’s a way of separating the soul of the character so that you notice it more,” she said. “I feel like I want film to heighten what we need to look at or what we need to pay attention to.”
Beauty and blood tell us where to look in “The Face of Horror,” and Biller’s commitment to creating “dignity for female characters” informs both. Having come close to leaving movie-making behind altogether, the writer/director has returned with a film that uses every tool at her disposal to insist on that integrity. It may be funny, gorgeous, grotesque, and excessive, but none of that make its pain insincere.
“I’m trying to just be a faithful messenger,” Biller said.
“The Face of Horror” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is seeking U.S. distribution.